Cooped Up? Dance on!

Crosby, a graduate of OHIO’s Honors Tutorial College, and Doell, a graduate of the College of Fine Arts, rallied LanDforms, their creative partnership that directs and is comprised of dancers, designers, musicians and installation artists, to present “Cooped Up: Drive-in Dances for Cooped Up People.” Drawing inspiration from and incorporating elements of drive-in movies, scavenger hunts and escape rooms, “Cooped Up” took audiences to seven locations around Seattle to enjoy performances from the safety of their cars.

“Right now, it’s so easy for us to be in this really intense place during this unprecedented time where we’re all thinking pretty expansively about how we take up space in this world,” says Doell. “Performing arts, and specifically dance, provide a moment for empathy, and our hope was that ‘Cooped Up’ was able to provide sort of a daydream that people could place themselves inside of and relate.”

Approximately 200 people attended three sold-out performances of “Cooped Up” in April. Using their smartphones and a digital map, audience members navigated their way around Seattle to seven locations where the artists delivered 10-minute dances that explored the realities and struggles of our COVID-19 lives. The entire experience was anchored by a 90-minute sound score, blending navigation, music, and poetry—all synched to audience drive times and each individual performance.

Doell and Crosby dreamt up “Cooped Up” while developing “Cupped Up,” a performance based on urban isolation, of being lonely while surrounded by people. When the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in stay-at-home orders, their idea for “Cupped Up” took on new meaning and another direction.

“We sort of reframed our thinking around it and started thinking about how we could fit it into these new guidelines and limitations,” Doell explains. “As artists, we’re always working inside limitations and trying to figure out the best way to make things work.”

Doell, Crosby and their LanDforms co-director Ari Kaufman spent two weeks creating, choreographing and directing “Cooped Up”—entirely by Zoom meetings and phone calls. A talented vocalist, Crosby focused on the narration and the 90-minute sound score, incorporating the original compositions of a few local musicians as well as their own. Kaufman served as the production manager, overseeing all of the logistics of this mobile performance. Doell was the movement coach for the nine artists who collaborated with LanDforms on “Cooped Up,” providing them compositional prompts that they could use to develop their dances.

For Crosby, Doell and Kaufman, the overall goal of the “Cooped Up” experience was to bring moments of levity and a sense of empathy to a community that saw the country’s very first cases of COVID-19.

“We’ve done site-specific performances before, but they’ve always had the audience in seats watching us,” Doell explains. “It’s never been that the audience has an immersive experience where they are in control of their experience.”

“Cooped Up” was not only well-received by the Seattle community and the performing artists who participated, but was featured in National Geographic, Crosscut magazine and SeattleDances.

“Our community was really excited and, I think, just grateful to have something happening during a moment where performing artists are kind of grappling with the idea of how we move forward,” Doell says. “I think a lot of performing artists are met with, we can’t do anything right now, and this was a creative solution that people were really impressed with.”

Doell added that she and Crosby have put “Cooped Up” on hold for the moment, shifting their focus to another issue at the forefront of their community and the nation.

“A lot of our current work is understanding how we can be supportive allies to our black and brown community members in the performing arts,” Doell notes.

They are also working on building a curriculum for “Cooped Up,” conversing with other residencies and universities to determine how to package the drive-in performances, and make them more accessible, so other entities can take the program and make it uniquely their own.

Crosby and Doell’s work today is just the latest in their nearly 10-year history of collaborating with each other and helping to support their community as well as those pursuing a career in the performing arts.

As OHIO students, they danced in each other’s work and together. As OHIO graduates, they both landed internships at The Yard, a non-profit contemporary artist residency, dance and performance center located on Martha’s Vineyard where they initially formed LanDforms. And both have returned to OHIO twice since graduating—once, while they were with The Yard, to work with students in the School of Dance, and again to participate in an alumni celebration hosted by the school.

Read more about Crosby and Doell, their LanDforms partnership and the “Cooped Up” experience.

Feature image: In their “Cooped Up” performance, Kara Beadle and Andy Zacek, a couple themselves, explore the dynamics couples are facing during COVID-19 and what it means to be sharing space, sometimes in close quarters, with someone you are in a close relationship with. Their performance looked at how to divide and sequester space and how important it is to have our own personal space during a period when space is limited. Photos by Devin Muñoz